Saturday, August 30, 2014

...touch upon the parable of Onan's sin, and address the impossibility of absolutist scriptural interpretations. Secondly, we'll summarize the nineteenth century and twentieth century social wars over "family" and "individual" communal arrangements, and the twenty-first century reactionary responses thereto. Then this one will cheat a little, and give you answers for human society which, for being technically non-provable here, won't count as cheating anyway, so there. We'll examine, throughout, how almost all of these philosophies are what is now called "transhumanism," or the antilife death-urge to destroy ourselves in order to alleviate the pain of existence.

We had just finished discussing how various forms of state-based sexual governance--the most popular being patriarchy and feminism--have been employed to successively break apart human communities. In this Part 2, we'll discuss the "communities" that were destroyed using these selfish variations on a theme. Pursuant to the established pattern, we'll begin with sexuality, which will exemplify, and lead us into, social arrangements as a whole.

Answers for Human Sexuality

Only the extremely skilled and durable male can produce a vaginal-only female orgasm during vaginal intercourse, while the much easier clitoral orgasm depends upon stimulation of an area that is unsuited for stimulation during two-partner intercourse. The clitoris can be clumsily stimulated during rear-entry vaginal penetration, jarring the rhythm of the intercourse itself, and even more clumsily stimulated during front-entry vaginal penetration, with a corresponding decrease in the quality and effectiveness of a coupling. Skillful lovers can adjust penetration angle to use grinding abdominal motions to offer the clitoris some stimulation during either front-entry or rear-entry, though rarely, if ever, with the focus necessary to achieve female orgasm in any significant proportion of that sex.

And yet, the muscle contractions and chemicals released during the female orgasm, whether vaginal or clitoral, increase the chances of insemination occurring, while, as mentioned before, only the most skillful and enduring men can produce a vaginal orgasm through penetration alone. What the eff, right? If the female orgasm improves chances of insemination, then--like any other factor in the rough and tumble jungle of evolution--shouldn't the genetic lines that made it to today have an easier time with female orgasms? Shouldn't vaginal stimulation be the primary determinant, and the clitoris only an aftereffect? Think of the massive gains in reproductive success, which would be enjoyed by a woman who vaginally orgasms as easily as her peers do clitorally (or, perish the thought, easier)--the math should be simple, just like the benefit to a human who would have developed a specialized sub-immune system for clearing winter phlegm or alleviating coughing fits that cause sleeplessness. Among monogamous population groups, and pursuant to the randomized mutations of Market-Style Evolution, groups with easier female orgasms should have long ago driven to extinction those groups without.

It's easy to bring a woman to a bunch of clitoral orgasms outside of a vaginal penetration situation, but that has no bearing on the getting-off of the reproductive male. So how do we reconcile this? Easy: female orgasms, like human sex, are not meant to be duopoly markets. Human women were crafted with a frontal clitoris designed to produce insemination-enhancing orgasms because they were supposed to be stimulated by a third person during mating. 20th century Earth's whining about the elusive pursuit of female pleasure is akin to 20th century Earth's whining about having it all--rewarding full-time career, thriving social life, fulfilling hobbies, personal emotional awareness, and helicopter parenting, too. Despite what Mr. Ford pretended, it simply doesn't work. It doesn't take great ape studies, or gangbang video revenue figures, to reveal what the clitoris can on its own: human sexuality is integrative.

The Judeo-Christian religious here may recall Lot's daughters' mutual pregnancy ploy subsequent to Sarah's coy introduction of Hagar, in dutiful service to the idea of being fruitful and multiplying, while Sapphic advocates may see their own correlation between the comparative manual skill level of most men, the comparative visual connectibility of most women, and the question, "How the hell did we survive this long if orgasms during MxF improve fertilization rates?"

Beyond the clitoris, of course, there are monkey and ape studies, gangbang video revenues, racy anthropological theories, and corresponding sets of fantasies on either sexual side. Sperm itself reinforces the clitoral aspect of the theory: yet again, it is a smaller subset of men that can produce on-demand pregnancy in one encounter during ovulation (although that's a much larger subset than the ones who can produce a vaginal-only orgasm), and there are enough PBS videos on millions of squiggling sperm dying in the birth canal to make evident the small likelihood of success. Plenty of men struggle with pregnancy like so many wayward salmon hopping out of the water and into a set of grizzly jaws, their only hopes to make mad use of porn and Viagra during wifey's ovulation week, or to consult special doctors to nudge their little tadpoles on a little faster. Not that there's anything to be ashamed about, wunderkids--but barring high technology and networks of skilled implantation technicians, plenty of men can't get the job done. (Even if, to their own credit, they are capable of navigating, or even thriving in, many other aspects of 21st century Earth.)

And what does that add up to? Just as does the clitoris, sperm informs us that the species, the community, is best continued in group form. Which is why gangbangs and bukkake are so popular, from the Marquis all the way forward to 2014, hundreds upon hundreds of years after the atomized sex protocols were instilled in attempts to stop the growth of human populations.

Again, the Judeo-Christian religious here may take a moment to recall the stark, unquestionable command to be fruitful and multiply, following on the heels of the first woman, and may reflect also on the admonition to Onan to fuck extra-maritally as many times as it took to produce offspring, which production was far more important to Yahweh than obtaining marriage vows. The functions of the vagina and the clitoris demonstrate not only the integrative nature of lightform evolution, where mutations during reproduction result in the simultaneous development of non-random, complementary systems, but also the integrative nature of the societies in which humans are designed to live.

Multiple male partners, should the woman in question so desire, increase women's chances of conceiving, making her more successful in both the "scientific" realm, and in the "biblical" one--the supposed work of both Darwin and Jehovah is accomplished fast as the community is more assured of reliable gains in power and growth potential. For Christians, one of the highest honors for a man is to raise and love a child who came from someone else. Even putting aside the fact that so much of the Torah was about how great it was for a man to impregnate someone to whom he was not married, the entire Gospel can be viewed as the success story of God's partnership with Joseph.

Sure--in a property-based system, where responsibility is individualized by state enforcement, death and ostracism are the punishments for failure, and everyone has learned to look out only for number 1, guys like Joseph are cuckold losers who have no game. In terms of Machiavellian genetics, it's stupid to care about any genes other than "your own," but actual evolution, that of species and planet, supports communal insemination and child-rearing. Sperm are supposed to die so easily because it's all right; the most successful aggregate insemination is a group activity. Exhibitionism and gangbangs are such commonplace fetishes (and such anti-selfish ones, which would have been definitively winnowed out were pop-evolution true) because they are aspects of human communality that have survived the recent purges. Societies which did it that way had fewer missed ovulations, as well as a greater aggregate masculine investment in each child. Fifty people in a group trying to push a rock up a hill always do it faster than fifty individuals trying to be the first to get their own rock to the top (although the capitalist who pretends to be sick, then steals some of the meat while everyone else is working on the rock, will see a short-term gain and believe himself very clever for looking out for number one).

(Amidst all this, it is indeed awful to be cuckolded, or to be forced to pay for someone else's kid. Here, almost everything legal is designed to be awful and hurtful, pinning person against person, and child support payments without DNA testing no less. Just as you'd defend your wallet, filled with Federal Reserve notes, from a mugger in this society, suddenly becoming the only selfless provisioner would instantly crush you. But wallet inspectors only operate in atomized societies based around the false notions of "individuals." Most of those free rider problems disappear from integrated communities, so talking about the right way to do it is talking about how to get rid of cuckolding and mugging and free-riding.)

LGBT Relationships

Sapphic advocates, similarly, may draw their own equally pleasant conclusions from their predicted effects of the comparative de-stigmatization of FxF integrality in the society-sustaining and -augmenting process. Proper reproductive patterns do not create exclusionary processes; more importantly, perhaps, said FxF integrality strongly reduces the likelihood of internally- (and externally-, duh) repressive behaviors in individuals or groups. Ergo the sapphically inclined but socially repressed/physically ignorant no longer need to realize themselves at 20, 35, or 67, but rather, as part of the natural developmental process. In short, girls who like girls learn about what that means so automatically that they don't even have to think about it, and they gravitate toward certain parts of the community's reproductive process, instantly having a valued role, and a life plan that runs from pupil to teacher to master. All midlife epiphanies of sexuality are pre-empted; all lost years and "what ifs" are shelved among the other tomes of the New Dark Ages.

(...and of course, some people don't wanna play, so they can do their own thing. They can be as exclusive as they want, and no one cares. The danger to the healthy, reproductively successful sexual community is if the bitter ones, disfavored in general participation, develop ethical theories about why their covetous isolation is the only right way, and begin to murder others to break up the community and enforce a code of isolation and shame. Maybe a travel story on that another time.)

Not-so-ironically, perhaps, does the most efficient take on the Judeo-Christian "be fruitful and multiply," and the seemingly-patriarchal polygamy of the early Jews, actually provide for the enshrinement and irreplaceable valuation of lesbian efficiency and skill. Not so the atomized "traditional" marriage, though, whether manifested by a couple straight people or a couple women.

Queer theorists who didn't care about the biblical stuff may be more interested in reflecting on how the development of modern lgbt relationship mores is also heavily affected by the long-coming, eerily absolutist trends of the faux-traditional marriage meme being applied to queer couples as it has been to straight ones. Like atomized marriage taking over straight people a thousand years ago, establishing unnatural isolations and imposing socially expected behaviors upon sexual intimacy, the gay marriage thing continues to alter the fundamental nature of not only actual queer marriages, but the social expectations placed upon the courting, coupled, flirting, aloof, or lonely queer individual.

Will joint tax returns make up for the oppressive crush of the isolated old queen, now deemed a social failure rather than an independent rebel? Will identical surnames being said respectfully by tellers at the local bank counterbalance the privately-felt collateral damage of the lesbian divorcée, who watches her friends snickering over the latest $26 million lesbian Hollywood divorce displayed upon the drugstore magazine rack? As every aspect of queer emotional affection and lust becomes subject to the same propertized rules as a dinner party at Jane Austen's house, expect it to become, in the aggregate, as salaciously boring and exploitative as Straightville, USA.

Congratulations: you just broke into prison.

Answers for Human Society

Everyone loves how funny it is that older people have to get up a lot at night to take a leak. And everyone knows how annoying it is that babies do the same damn thing. And then old people are always up in the morning, taking their brisk walk in the jogging suit before dawn, going to early-bird dinner specials, and falling asleep on the recliner at seven at night.

GEORGE: (upset) Could you put a little thought into this? Jerry's gone, you could humour me. He humours me.

ELAINE: Speaking of Jerry, his father is driving me so crazy down at Peterman's.

GEORGE: You know what I do at the Yankees, when one of these old guys is breathing down my neck?

ELAINE: What?

GEORGE: You schedule a late meeting.

ELAINE: (puzzlement) Huh? What does that do?

GEORGE: These old guys, they're up at 4 a.m., by two thirty they're wiped. (animated) How did we get back onto you?!

Elders are lonely and disconnected, toddlers never get enough attention. Infants move slowly, elders move slowly. Toddlers want to talk and learn, and they need to hear things a lot to remember them; elders want to find out what's going on with young people, and they want to tell old stories over and over about things that are important to them, and they feel miserable and forgotten if you tell them that they told you the story about the chicken dinner at that one casino seventeen times already.

Match made in heaven: elders are supposed to take care of the young. With some level of supervision, obviously, but that's how it works out. Elders and children are designed as complements to each other, while "teenagers" (adults) and "adults" (adults) like to stay up late, sleep in, and are, non-coincidentally, the best at doing all the work that provides for elders and children.

(With young adults and young elders, there's another generalized overlap: a sexual one. Inexperienced young men and young women, barring attempts to imitate porn or match peers' movie-generated expectations, are tentative, confused lovers, worried about embarrassing themselves and wishing they knew more. At a certain point we can call "adult," they learn about themselves and others, and become more vigorous in the aggregate. Young elders, then [again, barring attempts to imitate porn or prove themselves better than Bob and Liddy], return to slower, gentler patterns, and are filled with a desire to recount experiences and be a source of learning, wisdom, and understanding. Elder women may suddenly find themselves wanting, or needing, more firm interactions, which their younger selves may have been scared of receiving from younger men, and elder men may suddenly find themselves wanting, or needing, more drawn-out, emotional, softer interactions, which their younger selves may have been too inexperienced to provide to younger women.)

The atomized family, besides breaking apart communities as a whole, was part of the process of destroying age interaction. From mandatory school grades to the degradation of wages and ownership to the development of the retirement home, elites' antilife strategy has been to separate the young from the adult from the old. Children used to be cared for by their parents, their extended family, their village, and, well, everyone. Then, the "family" focus turned that into just the different generations of one patriarchal line, and then public schools and Social Security turned that into just the young and two adults of one patriarchal line. Kids were pushed out the doors to civics classes, while elders were pushed out the doors to eat creamed corn and crap their pants in front of a TV, and get bedsores down to their bones.

Growing up with elders who looked after you, and seeing adults care for those elders, is a real "compact among the generations," entirely different from Social Security. Like CPS, modern "old age" policies take tax money from working adults--who then have to work harder, and neglect their children and elders more, to pay those taxes. The tax dollars create billion-dollar industries of state old-age and youth prisons, where the children and elders are suffering, bullied, robbed, and neglected, and most importantly, severed from each other. Schools and retirement homes net billions of dollars in endless construction, technology, and drug costs, while putting walls between people who need each other the most. Children grow up under state supervision, listening to lectures and watching movies, and feeling so terribly alone that they kill themselves, or want to. Elders move toward death under state supervision, listening to lectures and watching movies, and feeling so terribly alone that they kill themselves, or want to.

...and through it all, the people who are paying for it see less of the results of their work. Sally is in school, sitting in the library during recess, hoping she can finish this chapter of her new favorite book before she has to hurry back to a room with forty other kids in it and watch an educational film about "The National Flags of Eastern Europe" before filling out a worksheet about the same. Mary is taking another double shift, crying inside about how she never has time for herself, never sees Sally or Grace, wondering where all the money is and why the apartment feels so damn sad. And across town, Grace is in her wheelchair on the front porch, thinking about the war, about John, about the nurse that just quit, and about that book she read once.

It's a poem about Hell, it's a circus of shadows. Sally's school gets a $6,400 subsidy from Washoe County public schools per attending student. Mary pays 25% of her hourly to DC, 12% to Nevada, $67 per month to Washoe County passed through her rent, and 8.1% more to Nevada when she buys something at the store on the way home. Grace's rent at the stage 2 memory care facility is $4,000 monthly, about a third of which is deferred by Medicare, and some of which her DMV pension covers. Laugh, little clowns, aren't the lights all so pretty?

What once would've been seen as insane is now the normal. So yes, there will be mandatory cameras inside your master bathroom, just as 30-year-olds and 40-year-olds will eventually be prevented from seeing each other without the supervision of a licensed midlife care supervisor. No, no, that's going too far; they do it slick, remember? No one'll actually be watching; there'll just be all these subtle but absolutely unquestionable social arrangements, a whole network of them built on top of each other, that makes it so that 99.9% of what happens is what would happen if a midlife care supervisor were actually watching. The beauty of the panopticon, remember, is its efficiency: you don't actually need to be watching all the time. What matters is that they feel like you are. So elders who shouldn't be toileting alone slip and hit their heads on the sink and die all the time, and dejected teenagers who shouldn't be wandering alone swallow bullets all the time, not because people are actually watching them, but because they've gotten the distinct impression, from somewhere, that they're supposed to be isolated.

You want to talk about idealism? Yeah, haha, how funny, the idea that everyone, or just "most people," could believe in something greater than themselves, and adhere to it when nobody's watching. The power of collectively imposed expectations is massive, which is why those kids are swallowing bullets when they feel that they're rejected. And all based on a mere sixteen years of subtle implications, never quite spelled out specifically, saying how things are supposed to be. So yes, let's talk about idealism, and how the evil ones actually believe in their own ideals, and that belief is what propels them to structure a society where, on a completely empty road you've driven a thousand times before, you still occasionally check your speedometer or wonder if you remembered your license. It's inefficient to set up a billion-dollar industry of extracting taxes from poor people to fund accountants and buildings and garages and assistants and secretaries to count numbers, which numbers fund accountants and buildings and garages and cars and guns and uniforms and badges and cops to enforce taxes, which taxes fund state programs and accountants and buildings and garages and cars and vans and ramps and wheelchairs and bedpans and old copies of Gone With The Wind, which things take awful care of the elders that get shoved out of their houses.

And it's hilarious, in a godawful sort of way, when those same poor tax-paying people desperately apply for jobs as "care assistants" at the retirement home, so that they can make $9.50 an hour wiping rancid shit from wrinkled asses, on a part-time basis, so that they can afford to live in a 600 square foot studio apartment in a building next to the railroad tracks. And it's even funnier when they get fired for missing work for going to a mandatory workshop to learn about how to sign up for a program that will get their child pre-kindergarten care from an institution that their taxes, when they were working at the grocery store a few years ago, helped pay for.

If you believe that that shit can happen, then there is nothing else you won't believe. And since that shit already has happened, welcome to idealism. The message can be changed. No lazy commune, even with free beer and heroin delivered hourly by genetically engineered winged unicorns, could possibly be as ass-backwards fantastical and impossibly unworkable as the steaming corpse-flavored wonderland of 2014 America.

Monday, August 25, 2014

Among the myriad recent structural attempts to destroy life have been the twentieth century's many divergent, diverse, yet eerily synchronized attempts to destroy everything human. Marx expressly wanted to destroy families and replace them with the state; anarchists expressly wanted to destroy the state and replace it with individuals and/or small, independent communities; feminists, springing off Marx in many early cases, wanted to use the state to destroy certain families and create others; neo-reactionaries wanted to destroy the modern state-feminist families and create their demented and incorrect take on what earlier families were supposed to have been like; neoliberals and neoconservatives wanted to destroy everything and replace it with a state which nonetheless disavowed, while essentially practicing, Marxism. Fun all around, and because of the way that list was written, now almost everyone hates this one, too.

A bit of scripture, neo-ironically, will start us off best, here. We'll touch upon the parable of Onan's sin, and address the impossibility of absolutist scriptural interpretations. Secondly, we'll summarize the nineteenth century and twentieth century social wars over "family" and "individual" communal arrangements, and the twenty-first century reactionary responses thereto. Then this one will cheat a little, and give you answers for human society which, for being technically non-provable here, won't count as cheating anyway, so there. We'll examine, throughout, how almost all of these philosophies are what is now called "transhumanism," or the antilife death-urge to destroy ourselves in order to alleviate the pain of existence.

Onan's Sin and Manly Hypocrisy

To Americans, the old-fashioned take on Onan's sin is that Onan was a guy who jerked off, and because of it, God killed him. The error derives from people remembering that, in that part of the Bible, Onan "spilled his seed on the ground," which they took to mean masturbation. This is part of the justification behind why Mormon perverts spend a great deal of time quizzing middle-school boys about the details of their masturbatory habits.

The actual Onan text goes:

Then Judah said to Onan, “Sleep with your brother’s wife and fulfill your duty to her as a brother-in-law to raise up offspring for your brother.” But Onan knew that the child would not be his; so whenever he slept with his brother’s wife, he spilled his semen on the ground to keep from providing offspring for his brother. What he did was wicked in the Lord’s sight; so the Lord put him to death also.

Genesis 38:8-10

A lot of fun things come out of this one. First, it's not at all about masturbation; Onan was just pulling out rather than ejaculating into the vagina. And obviously, non-marital sex is okay with the Judeo-Christian God, at least in certain circumstances. Most modern people aren't going to be much affected by that, but while we're here, the Alpha/Game/PUA manly-bloggers strongly identify as Christian, and what they really, really hate is the thought that they might be "cuckolded," or forced to have anything to do with someone else's child, and/or to provide for their own child that someone tricked them into having.

Irresponsibility aside, there's a valuable lesson here in the Onan parable, about filial duty--not so much a duty to the departed, but to the living, and the future, to provide for the continuation of the species, even if it sucks (in the sense of giving the individual less free time for play and/or self-discovery). Those of you who couldn't care less about the Bible don't need to care about this part, but for the community of online manly-men who have developed their own mutated form of selfish-Christianity, Onan makes a clear point, not about sex, but about communal obligation. Onan, like Joseph, is given a duty for a child that wouldn't be "his," strictly speaking, and while Joseph accepts the duty, Onan shirks it, and earns hisself a whoopin', as goes the vernacular.

Where to Spill and Textual Interpretation

Now, as to sexual proscriptions, Onan's story conflicts with the popular take on Abrahamic tradition. God approves of sex outside marriage, provided that it is done for procreation. He doesn't approve of pulling out to cum on the ground...but does he approve of facials? It's hard for semen to survive inside the female body, and not all intra-vaginal ejaculation during ovulation leads to pregnancy. If a woman regularly swallows a man's semen, though, her body adapts a little to that semen, and it becomes easier for said partner's semen to survive inside her. Adding that semen to the digestive system from the other end, via anal sex, has a similar effect, making it more likely that fertilization will occur during later vaginal bouts. So, if Onan and Tamar (his deceased brother's wife) are having trouble conceiving, and Tamar gives Onan blowjobs for a week with swallowing included, they increase their chances of producing the heir that Judah (wannabe grandfather) and the Lord are interested in--same show if they do anal for a week, provided Onan finishes inside Tamar.

Is sodomy, then, acceptable, since it's done in the ultimate pursuit of fertilizing Tamar and producing a child pleasing unto God? God specifically doesn't like Onan pulling out of the vaginal passage during sex and ejaculating onto the ground, but He says nothing about cumming on Tamar's skin (a tiiiiiiny, almost negligible, long term improvement in semen survivability, as compared to the noticeable improvement in the swallowing case), or in other orifices to increase their chances. If He means what He says, and that's what He says, then it looks like everything else is game-on. Non-marital sex, swallowing, anal and bukkake are okay when they're in the interests of the survival of the species, unless they're not, which could be an equally valid take.

Exceptio probat regulam suggests that Onan could've done all sorts of things in the furtherance of his duty, such as bringing in a few fluff girls to warm him up to Tamar, or--if he has occasional moments of physical attraction to men--topping a tender eunuch or a built hoplite until nearly the point of release, then transferring to Tamar for the meaningful few seconds--anything but spilling on the ground. His inaction was unacceptable; he had to get her pregnant, or he wasn't doing his duty before God.

More Lieth With

Leviticus tells Jews, and possibly Christians, not to lie with men as with women, but it says nothing about manual, oral, anal, or podophiliac behavior. Jewish law at the time (probably, formally) condemned sodomy, which was understood to be (probably, formally) male anal sex, but what, then, does it mean to say, "If a man also lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination..."? You can't lie with a man as you lie with a woman, if you're only permitted vaginal sex with women, so Leviticus 20:13 either:

1) Prohibits MxM sex only when one of them has been fully surgically-altered to possess a vagina, and the sex in question involves the penetration of that artificial vagina by one partner; or,

2) By condemning only MxM non-vaginal sex, gives the all-clear to MxF non-vaginal sex, because that's how you "lie with a woman," so, ipso facto, sodomy is acceptable as long as it doesn't involve MxM; or,

3) It's a metaphor that runs deeper than MxM or MxF, and "as he lieth with a woman" is a euphemism for not specific sex acts, but rather, a set of behavior patterns, such as MxM behavior that substitutes for social contribution. E.g., it's okay to have a couple boyfriends so long as you don't make your "lying with them" in the manner of a woman, so as long as you work hard and produce offspring and defend the tribe, you're allowed to have MxM during the day--just don't spend the night.

That's not a fun conclusion for some Christians, because it's so textually tight: if God commanded men not to lie with men "as he lieth with a women," then the condemnation of that MxM was a condemnation of only things which were authorized for MxF. "Lie with" could be any kind of metaphor you like, because otherwise, God would say it was okay for guys to have MxM anal all day long so long as they were standing or crouching, but not lying down; if it is a metaphor, then, it's speaking to something broader than just MxM anal penetration, e.g., a lifestyle which devalues the social necessity of women, and allows men to marginalize women by play-acting as each other's sole partners.

The War Against "The Family"

Humans have always been in quirky battles over how best to raise children, but the issue became far more serious with the advent of industrialism, when the British family structure proved inconvenient to factory overlords. Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, elites have worked under many guises to destroy the community element of "family," in order that replaceable, fungible, cog-like individuals could be atomized and isolated into powerless, depressed, productive worker bees.

Manly "game" guys thrive within the destructive illusion of classification, believing that feminism as a social movement has tried to destroy families and replace them with the State. Here's an example of that argument. And there's a lot of truth in that; no-fault divorce is, in se, great, but within the context of this insane corporatocracy, it's resulted in children losing daily access to their parents, and perhaps more importantly, becoming subject to an immense network of child-prisons. If you're not familiar with family courts and the various States' child-life-management agencies, take some time to pick through some of the whistleblower sites--like the vampire subculture in Blade, there exists this massive, pervasive, nationwide, yet largely unseen network of cops, probation-like placement officers, SWAT-like raid teams, kickback-receiving state shelters, and faceless bureaucratic hell, constantly jerking hundreds of thousands of kids around through walking nightmares.

Like the for-profit prison system, which is funneled hundreds of billions of dollars through the overabundant network of U.S. "criminal courts," and which spends its time kidnapping and beating and raping people for mostly victimless crimes and failure to properly conform to arbitrary administrative requirements, the anti-child network is driven primarily by an equally sinister set of "family courts," often cross-staffed by the same professionals at different points in their careers, whose goal is to make the life of a child subject to State control rather than parental control. It's a terrible, but possibly well-meaning, idea for the small percentage of homes where children are violently abused, but is solely a terrible idea in every other situation, reflecting in its every aspect the color of money, and our audacious arrangements of "State marriage" and "State divorce," where wedding planners, divorce attorneys, and the USG all work together to fuck up everything that can possibly be fucked up.

The dual nature of these sick systems is so closely linked it's maddening; kids go from CPS supervision, to school supervision, to prison supervision, to probation supervision, spending their entire lives generating menial labor for the overarching State. Child protective services literally kills children as part of its rampage. The biggest spur for these gulag monstrosities is no-fault divorce, where courts use marriage as a set up to get jurisdiction over alimony and child support payments for decades of post-tax profit, just as possession of a dime bag can justify seven years of the state expensively monitoring some guy with chronic back pain. State marriage is a loss leader for America's legal system, using cheap contract law to lure suckers in the front door. From the wiki above:

One use of a loss leader is to draw customers into a store where they are likely to buy other goods. The vendor expects that the typical customer will purchase other items at the same time as the loss leader and that the profit made on these items will be such that an overall profit is generated for the vendor.

"Loss lead" describes the concept that an item is offered for sale at a reduced price and is intended to "lead" to the subsequent sale of other items, the sales of which will be made in greater numbers, or greater profits, or both. It is offered at a price below its minimum profit margin—not necessarily below cost. The firm tries to maintain a current analysis of its accounts for both the loss lead and the associated items, so it can monitor how well the scheme is doing, as quickly as possible, thereby never suffering an overall net loss.

It sucks to be an un-savvy adult getting screwed by the system, but it sucks most of all to be the children, who have zero chance at a normal life once they've discovered that they are being monitored by paid government caseworkers, rather than people who love and know them. As soon as CPS enters a kid's life, the kid's chances of homelessness, underage pregnancy, drug abuse, suicide, adult prison time, and all the other bad stuff go up, so naturally, these programs are and have been the darlings of every single major American politician for the past several decades. Family courts and their business partners work with America's big banks to skim administrative fees out of monitored transfer systems, regularly review case records, decide where children and their parents can move, where they can work, what fields they can work in, what schools the children can go to, what they can be exposed to, and essentially, accustom a large slice of the population to constant police-state monitoring of everything they do. That's why these kids slide so easily into military service or prison labor: because when the State substitutes for the family, and kids are used to sleeping in a government facility, prison comes naturally.

People who hate "the patriarchy," or who have justifiable problems with some aspect of the "traditional American family," tend to see State intervention in a positive light--but just because George Zimmerman helped you take your trash to the curb one day, doesn't mean you want to let him inside your bedroom at night.

The 20th century trend of replacing private families with prison- and caseworker-like State institutions is terrible, wretched, and wrong. Carlos Morales again:

The first state back foster homes in the US weren't created until the Children's Aid Society in 1853, where children were removed from homes and became indentured servants for family farms. Then in in 1909,Theodore Roosevelt created a publicly funded volunteer organization that would "establish and publicize standards of child care."

This is the commonly held history of foster homes, but this is only one aspect of the history – the darker side is one steeped in a eugenics plan created by British and American Aristocrats to prevent the “scourge of savages” which were beginning to bloom in the United States due to the creation of prosperity through the industrial revolution. This led to Hispanic, Black, and Native American families having their children removed from their home and dumped into white foster homes for re-education. They double downed on efforts to prevent the “scourge of savages” coming to the United States by forcibly sterilizing over 100,000 people in the United States.

The CPS hammer disproportionately hits non-white communities, because it's mostly hurting poor people; when wealthier people get trapped in the system, the government drains a lot of money out of them, but usually they're able to buy lawyers who can establish and verify safe joint-parenting plans, and buy the right kind of daycare, so that their kids don't get kidnapped for playing outside. The latter case, incidentally, is a great illustration of how the State, with its goal of replacing "the family," forcibly intrudes on even those who are doing the best they can under shitty circumstances--but elites can always make it get worse for the proles.

It's hard for many middle class white people to understand the problems with the idea, "State monitoring of children." Bourgeois persons tend to hear complaints about CPS, and think, "Oh, those redneck perverts in the Bible belt beat their kids and raise them to be ignorant, and thank God that the State of Missouri is there to rescue them." This attitude bespeaks extreme privilege, because what State child support agencies primarily do is get poor children raped, starved, and beaten in foster homes, grinding their entire childhoods through a miasmatic blender of loveless hell, with a disproportionate impact on black and Hispanic families. It is the lucky position of the bourgeois, like that of white motorists in the best neighborhoods of San Francisco, to believe, so foolishly, that the complaints of "bad parents" are, like those of black motorists, the unjustified whining of those who deserve hell--because after all, I only got pulled over that one time when I was speeding! It's surely a lie that State agents are outrageously cruel and unfair to lesser peoples!

This series will ultimately condemn the faux-traditional family; however, the American Empire, with its torture prisons and endless wars, is about as good of a parent as you would expect after flipping through some pictures of bombarded Fallujah.

Faced with the horrors of today, one might be tempted to engage in a pseudo-traditionalist argument that "families are human history," and the best way to produce and care for children, and that we need to "re-take" families, or defend the concept from elites and feminists and all that. Like most of the neoconservative counterattacks to the 20th century's horrors, though, that line of reasoning is flawed and leads to bad places. The atomized family is, itself, a flawed, unnatural construct of feudalism, which was used by elites--like the family courts and CPS agencies of today--to supplant and shatter groups of humans nurturing each other.

Compared to the best way to do things, "families" are as bad as "Child Protective Services" are compared to families. Even the neo-reactionary conservatives and anti-feminists sometimes acknowledge this:

When feminists, and others, criticize the “housewife”, they miss the importance the housewife has for modern, mass society. Absent the traditional bonds of tribe and villages, anomie was destroying people in an urbanized, industrial environment. The development of the housewife held this back.

The housewife may not contribute to “GDP” but she contributes something just as important, she socially bonds the family together and bonds the family to the rest of the community. She has time to take care of dependent family members. She has time to develop meaningful relationships in the neigbourhood and the family’s social circle. She had time to support local organizations and by taking care of the household, she gave the husband time to support them.

The bread-winning husband is economically productive, while the housewife is socially productive.

In a modern, urban society, social productivity is as essential to the health of society as economic productivity, as the natural social relations and community of a tribal or village lifestyle simply do not exist. But building community takes time, something people working full-time, while taking care of children, simply do not have. The housewife had this time.

Naturally, hackles are raised all around at the idea that something is more important than earning fiat currency. But that very visceral feminist reaction--the hatred of being shunted into a "housewife" role--is a good thing, because it represents a proper female social memory complex response to the atomized family. The destruction of "tribe and village," so to speak, is not a necessary consequence of a planet's industrialist phase; it was, though, a necessary consequence of the way Earth did it, which is to say, it is necessary to shatter communities apart into atomized families in order to begin the severance that would lead, generations later, into the destruction of the family, and then the individual mind. So feminists, as well as everyone else, should be baring their teeth at the faux-traditional gender roles of "postwar America" (rather, interwar America). When masculinists, or whatever the hell else they call themselves, whine about the need for housewives, it's just as bad of an advocacy as it is when feminists stress the need for corporate careers or earning power: it's a way of selling out the integrated communities that people were meant to have, before the feudal, then industrial, then transhuman nobility began having their way with Earth. Atomized family units in the 1950s white flight suburbia were as progressively stressed and powerless then as atomized, childless individuals are now. The nightmares are generally not realized until later--when the deathbed, or the rituals of the memory care ward, drive home the meaning of priceless in a way almost no one sees coming.

Masculinism, Feminism, Problems Thereto

So, everyone knows the problems with patriarchy and/or feminism, right? Yawn, yawn. Women who weren't suited for lifestyle under patriarchy had their lives destroyed and possibilities limited; men could hold too much power over women, abused to their own ends...all that. And feminism, the bourgeois notion that well-off white women should hire low-wage minority women to raise their children for them, while pursuing careers that were formerly male-only, which eventually became the bourgeois notion that everyone should be equal, which equality was to be achieved first and foremost by providing child care and affirmative action careers to wealthy, predominantly white women in a tiny number of select first-world nations.

Comparatively few westerners would be willing to defend patriarchy, while in Earth 2014 the opposite holds true for feminism. We'll talk about feminism, first, ensuring that almost everyone hates this one thoroughly before moving onto patriarchy, where the few lingering conservatives will storm away in fury.

Assuming the best motives from those currently espousing selective, classist "isms," the feminist now is also a men's rights advocate, who so genuinely believes in equality of ability and freedom of choice that s/he loathes consistently "wrong" results in, say, graphs of sex-differentiated engineering career paths, now more than twenty years--and a generation of young girls' entire lifetimes--into a heavily counterweighted, expensive, pro-female technical push.

Put that aside for now, though; it's possible that, enough billions of dollars and decades later, some kind of statistical parity will be achieved, but it's also irrelevant. Ever since Betty Friedan decided to completely ignore the Civil Rights movement in favor of advocating for white women's corporate jobs, the structure of western feminism has been a class-based movement for expensive state intervention. However noble its end for those middle class bookkeepers angry about not being managers, and however stupid the quotes from Joey-Bob the Wife Beater at some bar in Georgia, the greater proportion of the world's women have never been of feminist concern when it came to time and money. Even if preferencing suburban white and Asian girls into college programs for decades was a just act, it was an unjust use of resources during decades where far more girls, some even white, were being murdered--murdered by the very same governments, male and female multimillionaires, that used the same extension of state power to prevent some jerk developer from only hiring male bookkeepers in his semi-regional construction business.

We could argue all day about whether women or men are better at abstract math, but here's a better set of equations: the vast majority of western feminists have been content to vote, rally, and fundraise for western politicians who butcher millions of foreign women, in exchange for blood-money kickbacks for subsidized birth control and abortions.

How many gang-raped and murdered El Salvadoran girls does it take to equal a hundred safe trips to Planned Parenthood? How many thousands of Sudanese girls with their vaginas torn apart by rifle barrels and Ethiopian warlord dick are justified by the firing of some moron pharmacist in Topeka who refused to bag Mononessa? The answer is fucking zero.

Knife cuts both ways, too: men's rights advocates complain, sometimes rightly (just like feminists did), about being culturally marginalized. Yeah, so statistics show that women abuse children and beat their spouses in equal ratios to, or more than, men, yet men are automatically to blame whenever something goes wrong. A man who calls the police about being abused by his wife gets laughed at (if he hasn't kept a careful photographic record over the years), mocked, and no one cares. And of course, that same man donates a significant portion of his tax dollars each year, at police gunpoint, to fund women's-only shelters, counseling services, support groups, hotlines, and advertising campaigns talking about how bad men are and how vulnerable women are.

And that all sucks, but how many men and boys did Bill Clinton kill in Iraq during the 90s? If Clinton killed only half a million Iraqis, that's probably somewhere over two hundred thousand males that he killed--slow deaths from starvation, dehydration, or denial of basic medical supplies. And that's just Iraq, just during Clinton's reign, and doesn't even count the ones bombed or shot or untrackable. So, what do you do if you're a guy who's really concerned about men's rights? That's right--you do the same thing as a woman who's genuinely concerned about women's rights: you put a billion percent of your energy, funding, outspokenness, marching, et cetera, into being anti-war, and into never ever voting for or supporting any candidate who kills boys or girls.

If you're a racist, a classist, or a nationalist, of course, those qualifications don't apply--you're allowed to only care about domestic sex policy, or domestic domestic-abuse policy, and say to hell with the rest of the world, without being a hypocrite. Barring that, if you're into some kind of sex-based temporal ism, and your immediate heavy focus is not being against war, you're proving yourself to be a little self interested.

Patriarchy Was Just As Narcissistic and Stupid

Patriarchy sucked domestically, too, just like feminism. Each movement was nothing more than an offshoot of modern nationalism, navel-gazing in the upstairs bathtub while the police burned down the black neighborhood across the street. "Patriarchy," or the idea of a male "head of household," was a way of making men feel proud for the privilege of slaving for a lord--because they could think of themselves as independent heads of households, which was supposed to make up for being subject to a feudal lord. Think about the same ruse as Lincoln used it on American blacks: "You're free! Congratulations! Now go sharecrop your life away in marginalized poverty, but be oh-so proud to do it, because you're "free"! Giving someone a gold star remains a remarkably effective way to get them to ignore the real results of a deal.

In case you're not up on feudalism, that's the system where the king owns everything, and rents out land to his vassals in exchange for promises of money and military service. And the lords had vassals of their own, in exchange for promises of money and military service. It was just a pyramid scheme, with only a few people near the top seeing any benefit; almost everyone else was a freeman or a serf, working away their lives in service of someone higher up the food chain.

To slip that shit over the heads of the laborers, feudalism had to destroy communities--and it did so with patriarchy. We'll talk in more detail about the ideal human community in a little bit, but for now, just take a bunch of happy idealistic notions of niceness: everyone living together in a network of villages, cooperating and all that nice stuff, and suddenly, a warlord murders a bunch of people, puts himself in charge of the entire country, and parcels out control of land to his lieutenants, who then take control of everyone else. In order to make everyone else feel less crappy about the arrangement, the atomized, isolated, unnatural, patriarchal, "traditional family" is developed--a means of throwing a bone to the greater mass of men, in order that they'll govern their wives and children such as to extract labor while forestalling revolt.

The patriarchal husband, by being granted "responsibility" for his family, is supposed to feel proud, just as the village headman is proud of managing the village, and the Count is proud of managing the County. Oh boy. Congratulations--we've just sold your planet back to you. You're now the proud owner of one rancid hut! Or, conversely, you're now the proud manager of a small strip of forty rancid huts! And of course, feudalism had all these other terrible throw-forwards to postmodernity in it: the modern suburban hell originated in feudalism, where lords wanted to further isolate these atomized "male-headed households" by getting each family unit to live in one "house." (The modern form of this, besides the inefficient, atrocious suburban house, is the use of kickback-linking, net non-neutrality, and journalistic consensus to isolate and marginalize even as integrative a tool as the internet.) Individualized housing cut down on the community. The idiot patriarchs who felt proud at managing a family, and at their state-granted authority over such family, were barking and crowing over table scraps, even as the high nobility stole the real meal.

(That's another reason why the Indians had to go, yo--they lived communally, and that kind of infection couldn't be allowed to spread to the white settler-pawns. People who live together know each other and rely on each other and have powerful bonds, and all that kind of social-unrest shit. It'll blow a lot of urban minds, but the actual white Christian settlers who just wanted to live in America often did okay living near tribes, intermarrying, farming, learning language, and stuff like that--until agents provocateurs from the great empires showed up to fund Syrian rebels that became ISIS, excuse me, that showed up to cause a Tonkin Gulf and get the war moving. And those agents provocateurs were primarily backed by the cosmopolitan, progressive, urban intellectuals who looked down on their rustic, unduly conservative countrymen--both for living disgracefully near the Indians, and then for being so violent as to war with them. This is a trend carried over perfectly nowadays, as educated liberals sneer at those stupid, violent, uneducated troops in Abu Ghraib, while simultaneously paying their taxes and voting for the War & Property Party.)

Some of the men's rights people, now, and a lot of the Game/PUA/Alpha people, think that the social problems they correctly observe--from dating to state economic intrusion--can be fixed by a "return" to patriarchy, which is an idea as flawed and shortsighted as "feminism" was in response to patriarchy.

There are obvious problems with this set-up, and it’s questionable whether this actually counts as “progress” or is maybe not simply a reshuffling of the same old deck. Even if gender isn’t necessarily the determinative factor, there’s still the powerful and the powerless...once you get into this mindset, focused on the acquisition of power, the people around you are less likely to look like human beings and more like useful tools. Which is why it is alarming that the language in Fifty Shades of Feminism is overwhelmingly more about individual aspiration — a dozen writers complaining about their difficulty in “moving up the ladder” at work, and so on — than about creating a more compassionate society. Because that could have been the goal of the removal of hierarchy, a society that is not structured around power but around empathy and compassion. A world based not around “I got mine” but around “We have ours.”

Reacting to a narcissistic female-centered ism with a narcissistic male-centered ism isn't a fix, but only a reversion to the last reaction, since various patriarchies have been used as bad responses to matriarchies. That's only the next scripted move in the elite playbook, being yet another way to make people proud of owning an acre instead of joining their people in owning a planet. The queen was so bad she makes the king look good by comparison, which isn't really true, since Dubya and Obama are the same president, just as Tony Blair proved as horrid as Margaret Thatcher. The reactive pattern will continue indefinitely until a non-reactive pattern develops, which is another way of saying that the beatings will continue until morale improves. Affirmatively putting an eye out in the service of a previously-pricked eye is, however seemingly fair, nothing but a brute counterattack. And before the weighty eyes of time, counterattacks done in the service of justice prove themselves to be merely attacks, bereft of prefix and as foul as their predecessors.

Sunday, August 24, 2014

This one once worked on a planet where they had the coolest, well, take on Death. It was an artificial planet built by a 5C people, but what made it interesting was the female Death they had. Some groundwork, first: it wasn't artificial in the structural sense, so no metal frameworks or any of that; it was actually made out of soil taken from various other places in their solar system, pounded together so it looked real, but they didn't understand that it wasn't alive, so they missed out on a lot of research by constantly assuming that their readings were from a "real" planet.

Anyway, they were out floating on this thing, and the bastards who controlled it had achieved this sort of limited immortality, but a really reliable one. Almost the whole place was urbanized, oceans in sacs in the upper atmosphere above the poles, and they'd thrown together this impressive array of eltarin webbing all around it, extending a few miles above the surface all around (pinioned on actual steel and aluminum poles that they'd built hundreds of, if you can believe that). So, whenever someone died, the network would catch the energy, it would funnel into a factory, and they'd kick out a new body, youth-duplicate, within a few hours.

And of course it was hell. Everyone wanted out, but they couldn't get out, because death added to your debt. The whole idea there for the elites was that, when you were born, you took on a certain quantity of debt (which they had the gall to call "planetary responsibility gift" for a period of over a hundred years), and it was added to incrementally every day. By the time someone hit adulthood (26) and was allowed to begin paying it back (they wouldn't even let parents do it ahead of time, and children couldn't hold property), it was pretty much insurmountable, and of course wages and such were all arranged so that no one except a few people ever got ahead of it.

Now, because of that mini eltarin field around the place, you couldn't escape your debt, and suicide only added to it, because you had to pay for the body. Near the beginning, some people would try to kill themselves a hundred times in a row, but each time, they were caught, reimplanted, and kicked out of some factory anew, numbers higher. Life was just work, work, work. Think factory-farmed chickens. Despite the size of the place, there were about 70 billion people at any given time, shunted into this pretty transparent caste system of workers and managers. Being a field technician was the highest honor, though all the real field technicians were stuffed into working pods half of each day; they called "field technician" anyone who oversaw a large enough portion of the network, i.e., by sitting in a pleasure pod doing nothing.

So in all other respects, this wasn't a 5C out of the ordinary, but the cool thing was, once every year (based on the source planet, and about 8 months), Death would appear. No, not joking--this actual Death-creature, very close to Earth imagery. Human skeleton, black robes with hood, and this thing that looked like a lacrosse stick (cultural associations equivalent to Earth-scythe). And you knew she was a girl because she had a nice figure under the robes. Very cool.

Anyway, once a year, she'd appear at a random location around the place, and go walking around. She was over a hundred feet tall, half transparent to look at, could walk through buildings, and was unaffected by weapons. Near the end of the sixth or seventh appearance, they blew up half a continent to get her, but she just walked out of the wreck and kept on. She'd walk around for about a day, and at the end of the day, she'd find one person and kill them with a swing of her lacrosse-stick-thing.

And like that, that one person would go off the radar. No energy entrapment, no factory rebirth, no debt. They didn't have the equipment to sense whether or not the person had returned to the greater field (because, like this one said, they still thought of their built-"planet" as natural, so they were cut off), but they did scour every inch of the place for signs of where the person had gone, and they never found anyone. And right after killing whoever it was, the "Death" vanishes, and is gone for another year, and the elites do everything they can to prepare to trap her the next time, but it never works. A hundred times in a row, at least. She walks right through everything, one person a year.

Naturally, she's a hero. There comes a religion, a rebellion (both very, very short-lived and almost comically tragic from this perspective), and eventually, just quiet acceptance. This is 5C, so they could tell that everyone wanted the hell out (even quite a few of the elites, though it took some scandals and hacking to get that info revealed). In the end, they decided to claim credit for her--her appearance became a holiday which they could never quite predict, and they would always act, after the fact, like they had summoned her to give relief to someone who'd worked particularly hard. This one never knew anyone who got out that way, but from reading around, it was pretty obvious that she chose on her own, and that she wasn't carrying out their will by rescuing someone who'd been secretly saving and paid themselves off.

Oh, forgot to mention--this happened with aging, too, so there was literally no death without Death. Work to the grave, appear young, do it over again. There was a time when someone figured out how, if you lived in certain places, worked in certain ways, and got lucky, you could avoid an exhaustion-death, and have everything paid off by age 104. Of course, once more than a few people did it, they adjusted the numbers a little bit, and a few people had to lose physical memory connections.

Anyway, just a story for travelers. The foreboding aspects aren't particularly new, but if you're out working and see something like that, here's a jump to your answer. (Firstly, this was not a Jenome infected planet. No prior "miracles," no localized isolation, and 100% of elitism was self-generated. So you won't necessarily find any of Them, and if you do, it won't necessarily answer any questions.) What happens is, with any of these wanderers, you'll probably find insubstantial yearnings in the building materials--if you don't, that's your answer. Anything notable means, as in the case of that shitty cobbled place, that the original source is trying to reconstitute itself, which is how this one later met "Death." She was getting the original souls back to the field, and the way the last survivors figured it out was by going into the old logs and determining that the thing had been built using 30% soil from their homeworld, which had been barely able to generate the "Death" at such a slow pace to break past the artificial field. If the elites there hadn't blown up half the place in this insane attempt, decades in, to "finally stop her," it could've taken millions of years to get the numbers of people there reduced to such a point as to solve the problem.

You'd all figure it out eventually, anyway; the important thing to remember here, this one thinks, is that, if you're ever influential somewhere during a transitory stage where they're thinking of building one of those artificial things, trick them into including a lot of native soil. If you at all can, don't let them make a 100% foreign vessel, or the people on it could get stuck in un-cycling until direct intervention. There are a lot of good arguments that should work on the worst of whatever elites you have: it's cheaper than externally mined building materials (big winner); it could have a "pacifying" effect on people who don't want to leave, because then they could feel like they were bringing along some of home; it further weakens the planet against regrowth (another one the sickos will love, and it'll hurt to make it, but this one's Death story shows that it'll actually help regrowth in the long run). And if it's Jenome-infected, all the easier to get elites to bring some dirt along if they were working with Them, although this one doesn't know what additional problems They might cause on artificials.

Tuesday, August 19, 2014

All our lives, we’ve been told to “be nonviolent.” Peaceful has always been pegged as a direct key to success.

Whether at home, school or in your bunk at camp, polite, calm behavior is something that has been instilled in everyone pretty much from birth. On the other hand, being physically confrontational has been equally condemned and made to be a quick path to failure. And, honestly, no rebuttal could say otherwise.

I mean, what good can come from being rude, right? Perhaps more than you might think. More recent studies, conducted by the University of Minnesota last year, provide us with a new side of the debate. The pro-violence one.

There has always been this sort of “urban legend” that has floated around modern society deeming inconsiderate people with frequent physical confrontations as having a high affinity for creative reasoning.

Frankly, I initially thought that people who "hurt others" had to be intelligent, out of necessity, to survive outside the boundaries of organization.

A homely secretary, her face littered with tears, packing up her desk. A page from last month’s Guns and Ammo ripped out and thrown at a co-worker. Scissor-marks distributed across the desk surface, like a battlefield.

The people in the cubicles next to you are covered in bruises. Then again, it’s your workspace, and thus, it feels very in-control. When you habitually fail to watch out for other people, you’re bound to get creative figuring out ways to make everything, I don’t know, fit. And fit comfortably.

While it might look completely rude to strangers, a lot of times, a person’s behavior is very methodical – with respect to himself.

Psychological scientist Kathleen Vohs, from the University of Minnesota, who set out to debunk this urban legend, didn’t confine her study to solely the workplace. No, Vohs, clearly a creative mind, chose to think outside the fist. She just sounds violent. The creative kind of violent.

Using a paradigm consisting of a testing room occupied by an inmate on loan from Corrections Corporation of America, which inmate had been recently penalized for his fifth assault and battery, and a second testing room occupied by an elderly woman from the local Baptist church, and a series of trials, Vohs concluded that violent behavior provokes more creative thinking – and provided scientific evidence!

The next question is, what exactly constitutes “creative thinking,” and how will being inconsiderate to others help you?

Creative thinking, in its purest form, is thinking outside the lines of “conventional” reasoning. When considering this, it should be no huge shock that shouldering past people on the subway, interrupting their stupid "routines," would promote creativity.

I suppose if you prefer to “shove,” and I use that term very loosely, your aching backside into a seat occupied by another person – you’re certainly thinking outside the lines of conventional reasoning. And that same concept could be applied to more abstract conception.

Consider this from Albert Einstein, “If a cluttered desk is a sign of a cluttered mind, then what are we to think of an empty desk?”

Obviously, Einstein’s desk looked like a spiteful ex-girlfriend had a mission to destroy his workspace, and executed it rather successfully. Yet, there’s no denying Einstein’s contribution to mankind's violence.

Consider this from Mark Twain, "Sometimes too much to drink is barely enough."

Mark Twain was frequently drunk, and because he was published, we have scientific evidence that he was one of the most imaginative minds of his generation. Accordingly, anyone wishing to be successful should drink more. Much, much more.

If the likes of Einstein and Mark Twain don’t catch the attention of Generation-Y, I give you Steve Jobs. No wonder he invented iBooks before anyone else had conceived of using a computer to read--it’s clear he had trouble maintaining his real life cool. He made children jump out of windows to their deaths just to escape his penny-pinching wrath. I suppose this just added to his brilliance.

So what does this mean to you? Hit random people on the street, beat your spouse, and hope for a touch of genius? Not exactly. The relationship between rude, violent behavior, and creativity, is by no means causal, even though it is highly scientific. Punching a cop won’t find you waking up one morning more creative.

The two are, however, correlated. If you are “violent by nature,” perhaps finding a healthy medium between knocking down seniors at the grocery store, and that urgency to be polite, is optimal. By curbing your desire to punch every ugly face you see, though, – keep in mind – you might also be curbing your overall creative tendencies.

Ultimately, the only way for you to gauge the effectiveness of your violence-induced creativity is to go out and experiment for yourself. So, go ahead, make the blood rain with all the losers, toss your landlord across the room, have a blast. See what you come up with, after.

PSA: If you have a roommate, tell him not to send me any hate mail when he wakes up in the hospital. Neither I, nor Kathleen Vohs, nor the University of Minnesota is liable for any of the future havoc my readers may create.

* * *

/end satire

* * *

Dan Scotti is the fool responsible for that article. The test he references was loaded, rigged, and fundamentally flawed. Kathleen Vohs uses test subjects' experiences with new-to-them test rooms in order to induce the "reaction" she measures. For example, a subject walks into a messy room, and has more brain activity and more "creative" thoughts in response to that room than when that subject (and/or a similar subject) walks into a clean room. Does this tell us, as they say, jack shit about messy rooms and creativity? No--it tells us that, upon encountering a room filled with brand new stuff for the first time ever, people have more to think about than when they discover a brand new room with nothing in it (or just fewer things to think about). The conclusions of this study have zero bearing upon the "messy workspace" of someone who spends a lot of time in that workplace--someone to whom that workplace is already familiar, and does not provoke the "first time ever" response behavior that would be experienced by the subjects. If you put on my underwear, you might think a lot about the sensations involved, because it would be a new experience; does that mean that my underwear makes you smarter? What if I'd first stuck a couple spiders in there? That's a guarantee of increased brain activity, once you put them on, but it doesn't make you more intelligent or creative.

Michael Smith wrote upon this aspect of modern scientistic journalism a few years back; there, the State of New York (sic) had commissioned a study to analyze how many injured bicyclists were wearing helmets and/or listening to music. And several M.D.s--people with nearly as many years of post-graduate education and research as Dr. Vohs, above--trumpeted the results as though they had any bearing on bike safety. In case you're missing the point, analyzing only the injured bicyclists ignores the denominator of the equation, thereby failing to provide us with any useful information. Smith:

Well, when the State of New York pays you to come up with some numbers, you come up with some numbers. Never mind that the numbers are meaningless.
The problem, of course, is the missing denominator. The Nine Doctors who signed this brain- dead document report that 13% of injured cyclists in New York are listening to music.

Well, that's nice to know. But it tells you nothing about music as a risk factor...If 13% of the cyclists who made it home safe and sound were also listening to music, then music isn't a risk factor at all. If 20% of the safe and sound cyclists were listening to music, then music makes you safer.

You see the problem? 87% of injured cyclists were male? Well, what percentage of cyclists in general are male? 80%? 90%? Without knowing these background numbers, the stats which the long-suffering taxpayers of New York paid these Dr Feelbads to accumulate are, bluntly, dogshit. They mean nothing. Less than nothing; they darken counsel by words without wisdom, as Jehovah observed in one of His testy moments...I don't know what they teach in med school these days, but clearly, elementary arithmetic is no longer required.

This is the problem with memorization winning the battle over thinking: you can get highly-paid, experienced, thoroughly-degreed professionals whose inability to perceive elementary logical flaws leaves them unable even to figure out how to acquire relevant data to test pet theories that were inane to begin with. And then their journal publishers and thousands of reviewing peers nod and smile at the "test results," so dazzled by the fact that a "test" occurred that their squishy, uncritical, fact-absorbing multiple-choice-minds fail to realize that the chemical composition of the average bag of manure for sale in Paraguay has very little to do with whether or not Canadian expectant mothers prefer "vanilla" or "new car smell" scent packets during the delivery process: even though both tests dealt with smell preferences! At this rate of intellectual decline, top scientists may soon be drawing conclusions about Holocene ecology based on their viewings of dinosaur cartoons.

(This is the deadly by-product of IQ tests, SAT tests, ACT tests, "No Child Left Behind," and all the other absolutist crap. Figuring out which number or shape comes next in a contrived pattern is fun, but too much focus on that kind of problem leaves the mind cripplingly vulnerable to the process of forcing pre-existing variables into place--an easy exploit for people who are good at making others see non-test situations as "tests.")

Pepsi could do a similar study to vindicate itself, thereby scientifically proving that Pepsi spurs brain development. Have subjects walk into two rooms: a room that is completely empty, and a room where a can of Pepsi is sitting on the floor. The first test subject thinks, "Hmm, an empty room." The second subject thinks, "Hmm, an empty room...whose Pepsi is that? Is it supposed to be for me? Is it part of the test?" Bingo--neural activity lights up. Proof positive that Pepsi makes people smarter. We must immediately enact a tax to amass funds to pay Pepsi to ship additional truckloads of soda to every children's school and neurology ward in the country!

When they're trying to make these claims, people love using visual artists as examples, particularly people working with oils. Because there, "clutter" might--might--have a purpose. If you're moved to work on a painting that takes 30 hours to complete, and then 6 hours later you're not, you have to switch, so you might, of necessity, have a dozen partially-finished paintings in the studio. That doesn't mean that having fifty old brushes on the floor, six mostly-finished open cans of turpenoid leaking vapors, and a handful of easels crusting over $100 worth of assorted paints, will make the artist's future work any more striking. The turpenoid vapors might actually produce the opposite effect.

American media, and increasingly, the American university, loves these substanceless, ego-stroking articles. "Why short people are better at putt-putt golf." "Why redheads enjoy Korean BBQ more than blondes." "Why highly successful people ignore Wrong Way traffic signs." Good grief, guys.

Who paid for this shit? It should be ironic enough on its own to try to scientifically study creativity--anyone who attempts that proves themselves unworthy, like the old-timey karate student who shouts at his master that he is now ready to wear a black belt--but in this age, hey, Kissinger and Morissette, right? What're you gonna do? Anyhoo, presuming you're dumb enough to think you can graph and chart creativity is one thing, but getting the taxpayers to pay for it via the NHI, well...if some ass in Hollywood did it, okay. They're not particularly creative, but they're in the stated business of being so, and at least it'd be a legitimate business cost for them. Even if it had been the University of Minnesota's MFA program in interpretive dance...but some dunce psychologist? Our society is acreative, which answers the question; of course acreative people would want to chart creativity, because they want to kill it, so that they would stop being at such a painful disadvantage.

Perhaps the second most dangerous indicator in this pile of filth, though, is the continued creep of the ordination of the term "scientist." The author of the original article calls the researcher "Psychological scientist..." rather than "Psychologist..." or "Scientist..." Either term would be acceptable in the current journalistic climate, and in theory, journalists are supposed to conserve words where they can, but more and more, it's becoming of importance to call anyone who is respected a "scientist" if the claim can at all be made, even if it makes the article longer or the printing more expensive, because the title itself has gained a magical power, implying that any refuse coming from such a priest need not be analyzed. Waste management artisan, of course.

The most dangerous indicator is the attack on creativity. In Earth 2014, when science-priests speak truth, and a fixed grid of potential answers promotes critical thinking for the young, the vengeful souls of the undispersed dead attempt to define creativity:

Creative thinking, in its purest form, is thinking outside the lines of “conventional” reasoning. When considering this, it should be no huge shock that messy rooms containing possessions misplaced from their “conventional” locations would promote creativity.

(Which is why so many Hollywood spinoffs and remakes and sequels are original, right?) Really though, what that simpleton is referring to with his "unconventional thinking" language is not "creativity," but "a character trait that can aid in business problem-solving, provided your company doesn't first crush you for being unconventional." Which is funny in its own way, because most businesses crush creative solutions as dangerous signs of deviance, even in the rare instances when someone comes up with one, so despite exposure to a full decade of "Motley Fool" articles, any smart American office drone knows to never reveal creativity around a standard project manager.

Considering how fucking filthy Americans are, it's unconventional to be tidy. Worse is the implication that creativity is a "lack of conventional reasoning," as opposed to "the ability to make new things or think of new ideas." New. Created. Has a relationship with "unconventional," but there is a sharp difference between "new" and "doing something a little differently." You can be creative, but still walk down the stairs in the conventional way, whereas you can be creative and fall down the stairs, and the stairs don't have a damn thing to do with whatever you painted on the second floor, before you went to the hospital/got a fresh glass of water.

Now, what other false, pointless, self-glorifying correlations can we come up with? We've got a budget of eighty-three dollars and ten cents, and we need to generate at least fifty thousand clicks and ten thousand shares. Anyone? Anyone?

Sunday, August 17, 2014

We don't know exactly when you're going to die. To have it hanging over our head like that, never knowing when it's going to happen; it's just really hard on us.

I don't think you appreciate the stress it causes us. When this whole thing lasted longer than two weeks, we really lost our patience. It could've been wrapped up so nicely, and thank goodness it wasn't, but it's been such a great stress wondering when it's going to happen.

We are revitalized by your strength in hanging on, just hanging on like that for so long, how long do you think it will be and how are you feeling? You don't realize the stress it puts on us, having to wait for you to go. Imagining all those nasty things inside you, seeing you like that, and contemplating you not being around anymore, is hard on all of us. Please appreciate that.

That's all they can tell you? You're serious? That's really all they can tell you? Why didn't you ask them about the other thing? How could you not have realized you should've asked about that? Here we are doing our best to help you, and you didn't ask them about the things we needed to know to do our best. I don't think you realize how hard you make it on all of us to go through this, and the least you could do is be less selfish and help us out.

We were thinking of doing some fun stuff, but we made the sacrifice and didn't because we were concerned about you. We wanted you to know we'd be right here to check up on you whenever you needed it. Don't you think it's sad that we haven't been able to do what we would've preferred while we waited for you to, you know, do your thing? Already?

When you talk about the future, will you stop talking about things as though they might not include you? It's selfish of you to constantly barrage people with reminders of your condition. Will you stop avoiding talking about the future? It's selfish of you to not have realistic discussions about our future plans. When you talk about the future, will you please stop acting like everything's okay and nothing's changed? It's selfish and immature of you to pretend that there isn't something real, there, that might happen to you. It's a sign of avoidance. It stresses us out and breaks our hearts and we care so much about you that we just can't deal with it.

You really are a selfish person. Most people in your situation would've been gone already, but there you are, enduring, as it were. You don't seem to appreciate all we've done for you while we're waiting for it to happen. We've gotten together several times to talk about how your condition has made you fail to appreciate us. How could you be so selfish? After all we've done for you. We've suggested things for you to ask them about, and we've had you explain to us in triplicate all of the things they've told you, and we've analyzed those things and speculated on how stressful they must be for all of us. We've pointed out where they've been incomplete or wrong. We've been here to support you and tell you how much we'll miss you. And we will miss you. Will you let us miss you, already?

Thursday, August 14, 2014

When he talks about how it was good that white policemen killed the black man in Ferguson, Obama has really allowed us to see the folly of disregarding racial differences in populations. Americans like to think that Hispanics are just "Hispanics," or that African Americans are just "African Americans," but actually, within all of these communities, there are levels of racial bias depending on the intensity of skin color. In Spain and in Mexico, those with less Moorish/Indian blood--who are lighter skinned--tend to be wealthier, popularized as actors and professors and politicians, while the same thing happens in American Hispanic communities and African ones. Those whose ancestors were willing and/or forced to breed with imperial murderers gain dividends in the form of imperial respect, a generation later.

Michael Brown (the guy killed in Ferguson) was much darker than Obama, just like Oscar Grant (the guy killed in California), and in response to his death, two very rich, powerful, cross-bred pale blacks have pronounced that his life was worthless.

We need to look back at the "Civil Rights movement," and realize how this idea of "diversity" has been used as cover for eliminating diversity by eliminating recognition of diversity within tokenized sub-groups. For example, calling African Americans "African American," rather than letting them trace themselves to one of thousands of disparate populations of hashemitic, Saharan, or sub-Saharan peoples across a rather massive continent. There are blacks with deep, dark skin that has an almost grayish tint; blacks with deep, dark skin that has a reddish tint; blacks with deep, dark skin that has a brownish tint; and, blacks that are less dark, in varying degrees, all the way up to what we call "Arabs." And of course, there are all sorts of facial feature coordinations and non-coordinations that go along with those genetic groups.

And then, there are these wealthy, dispassionate white-blacks who look so eagerly upon police killing darker people. Listening to Obama talk about Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, or any of the other darker dead, whether foreign or domestic, is like listening to a Klansman who has obtained office, but knows he has to speak in a carefully coded way to avoid losing swing votes. There is no humanity, only a mechanical recitation of the worthlessness of lives which stand in the way of racially motivated murderers. Yet, because of that slight brownish tint to his skin, Obama is privileged to pass such cruel judgment without being called a racist. And yet, he is--he's among the filthiest, most old-fashioned racists out there, tricking Americans about his innocence just because they think he's "black," when it is really Americans' own willful blindness to differences within African genetic groups that privilege the paler, European-compromised offspring to kill those who are darker.

When we decide that we're going to do something for "blacks" as an imaginary race, it kills all of the differences between those individual people(s), much like calling aboriginal American peoples "Native Americans" rather than by the names of their tribes. Our passion for "diversity" needs to be revealed for the racist screed it is: to recognize "diversity," you need to pre-emptively categorize people into a too-small set of understandable sub-groups, eliminating the identity of the individual in favor of the awful, racist tar-brush of the categorization.

Remember: when the white slavers came to Africa, they weren't hunting down the blacks that they shipped to the New-World colonies to sell. They were trading for those slaves with local African warlords, who sold them human beings at a profit. It offers us absolutely zero exoneration to hear, from a pale black warlord, that it is acceptable for paramilitary forces to murder dark black people in the streets. In fact, there's probably a connection between warlords--of whatever color--and gunning down people of whatever color in the streets.

This dumbass American simplification of races into checklists has removed a lot of the beauty of everyone's heritage, not least Africans'. Instead of talking about "blacks," we could be talking about the Nilotic peoples--the ethnic group from near the Nile river, which tends to have the "muddier," darker black skin--who were enslaved by paler Egyptians (Copt ethnicity), and who were probably closely related to the midway-dark hashemitic and semitic blacks who wrote the Torah, the Gospel, and the Qur'an. Even to our limited knowledge, there are hundreds of other distinct ethnic groups in Africa, but we're so lazy and superior that we treat them all the same, as "Africans," which is a literally murderous disservice. It leaves us completely blind to differences, power relations, and histories within and between those groups, which is probably why so many megacorps and elites are happy to talk about our simplified version of "diversity."

Wake up, guys; it's time to end the deep Klan. Open up all of the nasty things you'd say about Richard Nixon or David Duke or Robert E. Lee, and be willing to say those same things about Barack Obama. Melanin is not a defense for murder. Judge Obama by the content of his character, and determine that he is a racist pig who believes that dark black people should be gunned down in the streets.

Wednesday, August 13, 2014

One of the many interesting shifts in the Arab wing of the African genocide is the elimination of heroes from the battlefield. Through some twisted offspring of diversity, self-esteem, and the sanitization of culture, we have acceded to the removal of--and our elites have eliminated--the idea of recognizing anyone as a "hero."

Of course, we'd all say this is good, maybe at least as far as Israel goes. Every member of the IDF is a hero in Israel, just like every veteran in America is a hero, unless they say the wrong thing, et cetera. But that's not what heroism was really about. By selecting paragons of wartime valor in the campaigns of old, we left ourselves ways of remembering--of recognizing, in the first place--our own errors. Custer, for example, was a war hero, and it allowed him to be recognized as a foolhardy idiot. Not so shining an example, maybe, but that's only now. At the time, he was considered in some quarters a legitimate hero. Lionizing him allowed his persona, his image, to later be a bad example. Americans could look back at Custer, and see how his biography matched up with the failures of America at the time. Stripping away all recognition of heroes from conflict removes the possibility of those barometers. It makes things faceless: both current misplaced pride, and later regret. It's like prozac for the soul, dulling the ability to humanize, then recognize, the mistakes we made.

Crazy Horse makes for a good counterexample to Custer, since by his drinking and exuberant behavior, we can see a human reaction to genocide. He may have been a villain, and an antihero, but the creation of a villain implies the remembrance of a villain. To agree to hate Crazy Horse in the 1800s is to agree to remember him into the 2100s, allowing him to be recognized then as a hero. All we have now is Osama bin Laden, a sickly Machiavellian figure who supposedly administered from a cave. What good can you take out of that? Even in the service of evil, there is no valor; no challenge; no personal risk. Even if, in two hundred years, Osama bin Laden is remembered as a hero for giving up his ill-begotten Saudi wealth to resist American imperialism, he will be a "managerial" hero, rather than one who flew a plane into a building by hand.

Let's talk about a real hero, one Black Hawk. Every spring, Black Hawk would lead his people out of their winter grounds and back to their ancestral hunting grounds. For a few years, he began to notice all of these white settlers popping up where his people had been making their tipis for generations. So he finally told the settlers, "If I come back next year and find you here, we're going to get rid of you."

Naturally, the settlers didn't leave, so Black Hawk came back the next year, and it was on. He reclaimed the land, was chased away by a militia, then circled around a bit and beat the militia. They eventually caught him, of course, but he managed to become an American celebrity for a while. Black Hawk's War was pivotal in that it taught a budding imperialist known as Abraham Lincoln how to be a better imperialist by murdering families in the service of platitudes, and how using superior firepower to expand centralized control was great fun, but only if you stopped riding horses and stayed well clear of the action, such as by living in a mansion far away. It also taught Lincoln about how Rovian marketing tricks, like "resettlement" and "freedom" and "personal responsibility" could be used to give people completely different perceptions of the same concept--but that's another story. Back to our hero.

Black Hawk was hated and feared, and was identified in order that he could be hated and feared. At the time, elites wanted there to be hero-villains, to motivate people against specific enemies. Black Hawk actually rode, fought, shot arrows, hacked with knives, and scalped people, entirely different from today's "villains," who tend to be elder administrators.

And there's a power in that--a tremendous power. Americans cheered for their heroes of the genocide, booed their villains, and by so doing, made them a part of history. We can look back now on Black Hawk and Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull, et. al., and remember the people who were killed through the spirits of the ones we once reviled. The nameless brave was surely more heroic, but there is still an immense value in the process of personifying conflicts.

General Crook was a big white hero, and his heroism backfired on America in the long term, just like Black Hawk's. Crook was the Smedley Butler of the American genocide: an effective, intelligent tactician who went into combat with his troops, faced the enemy with idealism, and eventually discovered that he was merely a pawn of distant financial interests, and that the Indians actually weren't his enemy. He wrote exposés of the wrongness of the Indian Wars, embarrassing the armies and the banks and the land developers, and fell from historical favor. But you can still find out about him, because he was, for a while, a hero.

In our conflicts now, elites carefully support "our troops" and "veterans" in such a general way because they don't want to grant any of that power. Sure, it was stupid for people to celebritize soldiers--killers--in the past, but it had such a positive side-product, namely, that heroes were given a voice. And when actual people are given a voice, there is the chance--a chance never available with deep government and central bankers--that they will do the right thing. As Israel exterminates the Palestinians, they are careful not to lionize individuals in their own ranks, nor to single-out individual Palestinians who resisted them. The names of "terrorists" and "insurgents" are kept secret by governments, who want to be sure that, centuries later, real on-the-ground heroes are not rediscovered by people looking at what has happened.

The heroes do exist, though. Upon the hundreds of thousands of braves who never got a grave stone or were formally remembered, we can still reflect. Tecumseh can lead us to his people, and is an important waypoint in reflecting upon their valor, but even when the elites scrub heroes out of existence, we still know they are there. Pick an average day in Gaza. You know the story. Rubble litters the streets, people sleep on sheets spread across dirty concrete, and a teenager walks out of his house to take a piss in the alley. He stops with the door just a crack open--across the street, there are the Jews again, dragging his neighbor out of the house by her hair. Someone's dead inside, but all he can see is the woman, who was always nice and who was friends with his mom for as long as he can remember. There are six soldiers, all with AR-15s, and there's an armored IDF truck running nearby, but when he sees the woman crying, he doesn't shut the door and hide quietly. He picks up a chunk of concrete and hurls it at one of the soldiers. The first one misses, but the second one gets one of them in the shoulder, as four of the other Jews have already turned their rifles to fill him full of bullets.

The soldier with the hurt shoulder will get an award and a few days off, then be good as new. He'll live the rest of his life completely proud of and at peace with himself. The little Arab kid will lose consciousness in a matter of seconds, and never regain it. The woman across the street is still going to get beaten, and her sons are still going to be tortured in jail. But for that moment there, that kid was a hero, and even though no one alive will ever know his name or his face, you can remember what happened. Imagine that courage, and without a name or a face, you can still look at the most impartial description of Gaza and know that it happened that way at least several hundred times, and you can get just a little taste of heroism. You don't need their tokens.

The buffalo is all gone, and an Indian can't catch enough jack rabbits to subsist himself and his family, and then, there aren't enough jack rabbits to catch. What are they to do? ...If you will investigate all the Indian troubles, you will find that there is something wrong of this nature at the bottom of all of them, something relating to the supplies, or else a tardy and broken faith on the part of the general government.

* * *

It has pleased the Great Spirit that I am here today— I have eaten with my white friends. The earth is our mother— we are now on it, with the Great spirit above us; it is good. I hope we are all friends here. A few winters ago I was fighting against you. I did wrong, perhaps, but that is past—it is buried—let it be forgotten.

Rock River was a beautiful country. I liked my towns, my cornfields and the home of my people. I fought for it. It is now yours. Keep it as we did— it will produce you good crops.

I thank the Great Spirit that I am now friendly with my white brethren. We are here together, we have eaten together; we are friends; it is his wish and mine. I thank you for your friendship.

I was once a great warrior; I am now poor. Keokuk has been the cause of my present situation; but I do not attach blame to him. I am now old. I have looked upon the Mississippi since I have been a child. I love the great river. I have dwelt upon its banks from the time I was an infant. I look upon it now. I shake hands with you, and as it is my wish, I hope you are my friends.

The latter quote is an aging Black Hawk, and look at it again: he is more profound; more intelligent; more human; more everything good than any American leader has ever said, read off a teleprompter, or even had ghostwritten for them in their post-mouthpiece exculpatory bullshit tomes. The former quote is an aging General Crook, from before he resigned his command in disgust. The Apache (another tribe collectively raped of their name by the MIC, rather than individually like Black Hawk, for one of their darkie-killing helicopter gunships) were even cool and gave him an Indian name later. That's the kind of acceptance that, if you will, Heinlein looks for (however incorrectly) in his division of citizen and civilian; the power of Crook and the Apache, the power of the hero, is that people willing to personally put it on the line can often recognize one another as someone willing to put it on the line. There's a deeper peace, and a greater rebellion, in that connection, which transcends hypocritical prose.

(That's also why only former soldiers/policemen will ever successfully overthrow a tyrannical government, and why it's hypocritical, wrong, and counterproductive of dissidents to group-judge soldiers and cops. People willing to put their lives on the line have the strength necessary to do what's right, if they discover what that is, while people only willing to talk and/or chant are easily put down or ignored. The reformed soldier, his bravery intact but eyes opened, is the bane of the tyrant; the impotent whiner is the tyrant's lifeblood.)

This is why they are afraid of recognizing heroes, even their own. By eliminating heroes from their stories--even their awful, racist, untrue stories--they are trying to damage our social memory complexes and proscribe our ability to, firstly, identify with what happened, and secondly, to know at all what happened. They are trying to turn history into a story without characters (next comes setting and plot, but that's hopefully way too far ahead to do now). We can't stop their scrubbing of history, or their circumcision of even current memory, and for this one to try to teach this is a bit ahead of where we are now, but try to hang onto that lesson for your next time around: even if you can't read or hear about it, you can connect to how it happened. You can remember the heroes who existed, and know what they must have done, and what they did, and venerate them for it, and learn from it. Tecumseh was noble, brave, and great, and Cotton Mather was vile, and no doubt many more of their people were versions of that which equaled or exceeded the names we know. Yet for how great Tecumseh was, we do not need Tecumseh to know that same thing about many among his people. Life brings with it the necessary connections, such that you don't require the "history iCloud" in order to determine how brave or just some of those aboriginals were.